There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents,... each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is said the city was spared a golden-oak period because its residents, lacking money to buy the popular atrocities of the ninet...ies, necessarily clung to their rosewood and mahogany.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they ...sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

[Asked, upon the death of her fast friend and sister suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1816-1902), which period of their associat...ion she had enjoyed the most:] The days when the struggle was the hardest and the fight the thickest; when the whole world was against us and we had to stand the closer to each other; when I would go to her home and help with the children and the housekeeping through the day and then we would sit up far into the night preparing our ammunition and getting ready to move on the enemy. The years since the rewards began to come have brought no enjoyment like that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Remember how often you have postponed minding your interest, and let slip those opportunities the gods have given you. It is now h...igh time to consider what sort of world you are part of, and from what kind of governor of it you are descended; that you have a set period assigned you to act in, and unless you improve it to brighten and compose your thoughts, it will quickly run off with you, and be lost beyond recovery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction between... our present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.... Moreover this activity ...must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: "youth" is t...he privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Afterwards, when the bombshell of early motherhood first hit, I remember wondering how any woman could possibly entertain erotic t...houghts while sleepwaking through the chaos of feeds, nappies stress and fatigue. I assume my husband and I must have had sex at least a few times in that two year period ... but I must say I can't remember it happening. Perhaps I dozed through it, who knows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »